Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Sara Valentine, 20, may be President
Barack Obama’s ideal voter in Ohio: She had the distinction of
casting the first vote in Franklin County after spending the
previous night in the rain trying to fire up her college peers
to vote.

Obama isn’t leaving to chance the support of voters like
Valentine, one of his foot soldiers at Ohio State University in
Columbus. He needs the state’s youngest voting bloc, dubbed the
millenials, to show up at the polls to win re-election.

Obama won more than 60 percent of the vote among 18- to 29-year-olds in 2008, which comprised 17 percent of the Buckeye
State electorate and provided the margin of victory. It’ll be a
challenge to match that in this year’s election.

“The enthusiasm isn’t quite at the same level as it was in
2008; that was kind of an unparalleled election,” said Hillary
Doyle, 21, who works for OSU Votes, a nonpartisan campus
committee focused on voter registration and education. The 2012
election is no longer “such a motion of change,” said her
colleague Alfred Yates, 21.

Obama still is forecast to win big among young voters in
the Nov. 6 election. In a survey by Harvard University’s
Institute of Politics of likely voters younger than 30, he led
Republican challenger Mitt Romney 55 percent to 36 percent.
Forty-eight percent of young adults surveyed said they would
“definitely” vote, according to the survey released Oct. 17.

Tough to Mobilize

Compounding the diminished enthusiasm is that more than
half of Ohio’s 18- to 24-year-olds aren’t in college and harder
to mobilize and engage, according to data from the Center for
Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

Still, the Obama campaign says it can compensate for the
reduced intensity. The campaign has much more of a head start in
the state than in 2008: It has been organizing in Ohio for the
past three and a half years.

The campaign has thousands of student volunteers across the
state, many employing social-media platforms such as Facebook
Inc. and Twitter Inc., which weren’t used as widely four years
ago. On Election Day in 2008, there were 1.8 million tweets; now
that many tweets are sent every six minutes, according to
Rachael Horwitz, a Twitter spokeswoman.

At Ohio State, “we are an armada of volunteers, we are
organizing so well,” Valentine, president of Buckeyes for Obama
and a campaign intern, said in an interview. “We are talking,
we are on social media, we are everywhere.”

Ohio State

Obama has been focusing on college campuses as places to
rally and galvanize young voters -- many of them voting for the
first time in a presidential election.

Since March, the president has crisscrossed the state,
appearing on at least seven campuses, including Ohio State; Ohio
University in Athens in the southeast; Bowling Green State
University in the northwest; Kent State University in the
northeast; Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland; Cleveland
State University, and Capital University in Columbus.

Obama three times this year has gone to Ohio State, the
largest public university in the state with more than 56,000
students.

The president’s repeat appearance makes it “very evident”
that people “across the country are looking at Ohio State and
the young vote at one of the largest campuses in the country,”
said Yates, the co-chair of OSU Votes, sitting in a courtyard of
the Ohio Union and donning a dress shirt, tie and cufflinks.

‘So Cool’

Angelle Bradford, 20, who grew up in Louisiana, registered
and voted early for Obama in Franklin County. “It was so cool
to be at OSU, to be in a swing state, to actually feel like for
once my vote meant more than just being discounted,” she said
as she walked into the campus’s Gateway Film Center to watch the
final presidential debate held in Florida on Oct. 22. Bradford
is an intern working for the Obama campaign.

“College campuses are high-yield places to try and recruit
voters to your side,” said Paul Beck, a professor of social and
behavioral sciences at Ohio State, in a telephone interview.

When Obama visited Ohio State on Oct. 9, he drew a crowd of
about 15,000 with the help of performer will.i.am of the Black
Eyed Peas. Buses took about 500 students to the early-voting
location about seven miles away, off Interstate 71. The party
with will.i.am continued in the parking lot of the voting
location, according to Don Klco and Frederick Stratmann,
managers of the early-voting center.

The Obama campaign has an office on campus with student
volunteers. A poster plastered on the front window calls for
students to “catch a ride with us” to vote early, until Nov.
1. The sweetener: “Free Food; Come Together; Make History.”

Ohio University

At an Oct. 17 rally at Ohio University in Athens, the
state’s fourth-largest public university, Obama urged a crowd of
14,000 to grab “some friends” to vote the next day. “Go vote.
See, my assumption is if you’re here you’re going to vote. So
you’ve got to go back to your dorm, grab that guy who’s sitting
there eating chips, watching SportsCenter. Tell him he’s got to
vote, too,” Obama said to laughter.

The young-voter turnout will be concentrated in Athens,
said Patrick Duffy, 24, a graduate of the university, who now
works as a private contractor for state representative Debbie
Phillips, a Democrat.

Romney’s Message

With the state of the U.S. economy at the forefront in this
election, Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has
crafted his appeal to young voters by concentrating his message
on job creation and opportunities. He has criticized Obama’s
tours of colleges, saying the president would make “promises of
free stuff” to re-engage students and get them to vote for him.

While Obama’s support among college-age students and those
under 30 is unmatched by Romney, the challenger probably will
siphon off some millennial voters from Obama’s corner.

Miranda Onnen, 20, a Cincinnati native who is part of Ohio
State’s College Republicans, said she registered in the county
and voted early for Romney. “He’s the one that is going to get
things done,” she said at the Ohio Union. “He’s going to help
me get a job out of college.”

Complicating Obama’s math this year may be disillusionment
over economic policies among “the radical left,” such as those
who backed the Occupy Wall Street movement, said Peter Levine,
director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic
Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Medford,
Massachusetts. There’s a “pretty good chance they won’t vote,”
he said in a telephone interview.

If turnout is somewhat reduced this year, “it’s something
of a return to the normal,” compared with 2008, Levine said.

Smaller Colleges

While larger public universities have been the center of
attention in the campaign, smaller colleges scattered across
Ohio are part of Obama’s calculation to boost turnout.

At private Otterbein University in Westerville outside
Columbus the atmosphere is subdued with no election buzz echoing
through the tree-strewn campus. Still, some students interviewed
there said they’ve voted early or plan to vote.

“The enthusiasm is really high this year,” said Tyler
Cromwell, 19, a nursing student, who voted early for Obama. “A
lot of my friends were having debate-watch parties.”

Kenyon College “is an island of Democrats in a Republican
sea,” said John Elliott, a political science professor at the
college in Gambier. In Republican-dominated Knox County, Obama
campaigners are in a countering mode rather than finding
“ready-made” supporters, according to Elliott.

“People at Kenyon will absolutely turn out to vote,” said
Sarah Marnell, the president of Kenyon Democrats. She and Sydney
Watnick, the group’s vice president, have been doing early-voter
drives and canvassing.

“It’s a different moment than it was in 2008,” Marnell
said. “It’s not quite as monumental,” she said. Still, “the
support is very strong.”